The Christmas Orphans Club(13)
As the coffee brews, he leans against the counter. “I think I’ve figured out what I was doing wrong with the pizza crust,” David announces. He’s been trying to hack the at-home version of our favorite prosciutto and arugula pizza from a little pizzeria in the West Village for months. “How about I give it another whack tonight and we can start that Netflix series my brother was telling us about. Maybe it could be a light at the end of the tunnel after dealing with Mitch all day,” he suggests.
“That sounds amazing, but I can’t. I’m grabbing drinks with my friends tonight.”
I don’t need to specify who I mean when I say my friends. I have work friends—people I brave the Sweetgreen line and trade bits of office gossip with—and I’m happy to double-date with David’s college friends from NYU, but I’m always relieved when their wives or girlfriends don’t follow up on their promises that we have to make plans to hang out without the boys. “My friends” will always refer to Finn, Priya, and Theo.
David gets along with them well enough, but not so much that he’s part of the group. Not that there was much of a group to be part of when we started dating. That was the year Finn and I weren’t speaking. But even so, we have too much shared history for someone new to catch up. When David joins us, we’re constantly having to stop and explain that Elise is Priya’s monstrous ex-boss, the one who laid her off at Refinery29, or that one time Finn cajoled us into playing beer pong with gin and tonics and none of us have touched gin since, or that Theo’s mother was in a terrible art house movie in the eighties, a contemporary remake of Madame Butterfly called Ms. Butterfly, and we laugh hysterically whenever anyone says the word “butterfly” in any context.
“Is it someone’s birthday?” David asks.
“No?”
“Oh, I just thought . . .” He trails off. “Never mind me. Pre-coffee brain.” He pours a splash of half-and-half into my coffee and sets it down on the counter in front of me.
Even though he didn’t mean anything by it, his comment bristles. The implication that we need a reason to get together. But if I’m honest, it’s been a while since we’ve had plans as a foursome.
“No occasion, really. Just catching up.”
“Well, can you pencil me in for tomorrow night?” he asks.
“Tomorrow night? I thought you were going to your brother’s apartment to watch the game.” David’s brothers and a few of their childhood friends have a fantasy football league they take way too seriously. They get together on Thursdays to watch whatever game is on and talk strategy. David is their de facto statistician. At the end of the season, whoever loses has to fulfill a silly bet, which is how David ended up sitting for the SATs last spring. He actually enjoyed brushing up for it, going so far as to buy a stack of test prep books. I teased him mercilessly when he brought SAT Prep for Dummies to bed with him, but he was the one laughing when his score went up by twenty points since he took the test in high school.
“I can skip this week,” he tells me. “I’d much rather spend time with you.”
I stand on the footrest of my stool and lean over the kitchen island to catch his lips with my own. “Yes,” I tell him. “Don’t pencil me in. Use pen.”
* * *
? ? ?
?That night, I’m the first to arrive at Rolf’s. In December, there’s a line around the block, but in mid-November, it’s me and a skeleton crew of regulars.
The regulars at a Christmas-themed bar are a quirky bunch: women in their sixties who look straight out of the SNL mom-jeans sketch with feathered hairstyles and sweatshirts with applique flowers. They gossip at length about their husbands while throwing back glasses of merlot and eating from party-sized bags of Lay’s potato chips they’re inexplicably allowed to bring in, even though Rolf’s is also a German restaurant.
I claim a stool in the middle of the bar—close enough to eavesdrop, but far enough away not to seem nosy—and order a warm spiked apple cider. I watch the bartender, a bored-looking kid in his early twenties, fix my drink in a goblet the size of my head.
The women remind me of how my mom was with her friends. What would she be like if she were still alive today? I count the years on my fingers to figure out how old she’d be: fifty-seven. Fifteen years since she died. This Christmas she’ll have been gone for as many Christmases in my life as she was alive for, and the thought makes me unbearably sad. Over time, missing her has softened to a dull thrum in the back of my chest, but every once in a while, like now, it floods through me at full volume.
I still picture her as she was before she got sick: smiling out from a sign on a bus bench advertising her as edison’s favorite real estate agent. She wanted the ad to say “top real estate agent,” which wasn’t technically true. However, she was the undisputed queen of the town’s gossip mill, which made her a favorite with certain types. The year of her diagnosis, she got the Rachel haircut, which even then she was a few years late to—Jennifer Aniston was already onto her sleek flat-iron phase—but she was incredibly proud of the haircut nonetheless. I imagine she’d have updated it by now if she were alive, but my mental image of her is frozen in time. An eternal Rachel Greene.
Rolf’s is like that, too; never changes. Year-round, every available square inch of ceiling and wall space is covered in faux pine and dripping with Christmas ornaments and fake plastic icicles. Rolf’s found its niche and sticks with it. I respect that.